The Night House (2020)

Sustained ambiguity underpins the lasting appeal of the very best chillers, from The Turn Of The Screw to The Shining; Stanley Kubrick's take at least.

So often in this genre the final third involves a kind of disambiguation that spoils the whole experience, but I am happy to report that that kind of thing is largely avoided here. 

Questions that might have arisen earlier — is that a dream, is she a ghost? — are lingering pleasingly at the end. Did I want to know more about Owen's impulse to construct a back-to-front version of his mainstream domestic arrangement. Kind of. 

But in the end the movie basically works, and its creators are well enough aware of this to avoid all the usual jump scares. In fact there are one or two examples of negative jump scares here — moments that turn turbo-terrifying due to the absence of the expected jolt. 

And above all it works because the lead is being played by Rebecca Hall. 

The Guilty (2021)

Will there be a more perfect example of the pandemic production before we are through with all this?

Hire one A-list face and plonk him in a single location in front of a load of insistently bleeping phone-lines. "911...?".

It's a bit like Call Centre: The Movie with just a tad more jeopardy and a pre-fabbed back-story that ends up substantially more interesting than the front-story. 

Turns out that a lot of the people on the line were famous too, but I needed IMDB to help me with that. Ethan Hawke might have well been 'phoning in' his performance quite literally from his downstairs lavatory. 

Amberlievable!

That La Antigua has slipped back into AMBER status while most of its outlying communities remain firmly in the RED might suggest that the epidemiology of Sars-Cov-2 is as yet truly opaque to us.

Yet one doesn't have to be a genius to figure out what is really going on here. 

I have a mate that works at a well-known craft beer emporium, both at the main venue and at the sucursal in town on 6a Calle. Should he suddenly develop a fever accompanied by sneezing fits, he'd surely set off for the Centro at the northern end of town for rapid antigen test, providing his contact details in case of a positive result. 

Since nobody would be able to say for sure where (or from whom) he picked up the dreadeds, his case would most likely be chalked up against his home address...in Jocotenango. See?

I'm sure they've seen at the Ayuntamiento and have had a bit of a chuckle about this. La Antigua has the densest, busiest concentrations of transmission hotspots, with people popping in and out from all over the place, yet the statistical blame is disproportionately landing elsewhere…on the periphery. 

The Card Counter (2021)

I once read somewhere that the correct reading of Lolita was as a satire on a certain kind of Americana,  a very specific sort of road trip. 

I recalled this little insight whilst watching the legendary Paul Schrader's new movie, which is immensely successful as the vessel of an uneasy encounter with a very monotonous, some might say soulless American aesthetic, and yet, for me at least, unsuccessful on almost every other level. 

Yes, it stars the second most famous Guatemalan in the world, but Oscar Isaac manifests here more via his own charismatic movie star persona than as the character of a messed up former-PFC previously involved in degrading torture in Iraq. 

There are two other lead characters, and they are also sketchy, essentially arc-less and contained within a narrative that flatlines in deference to the mise-en-scène.

Free Guy (2021)

A very good and relentlessly entertaining movie that barely pauses to allow one to perceive the flickering form of its shadow: the better, or at least profounder version of itself that Disney perhaps chose not to make. 

On some levels it is an unusually original proposition and yet at the same time so obviously grounded in more self-regarding stuff that already exists in the ecosystem —  The Matrix, The Truman Show, even Blade Runner — plus the superstar charisma of Ryan Reynolds which is perhaps where it gets its permission to be so glib. 

The film demonstrates an understanding of gaming as spectacle whilst handling those slightly thornier underlying issues in much the same way that Black Widow handled grooming and people smuggling. 

Will it reward repeat viewings in two decades time like many of those aforementioned canonical titles? 

Of one thing I can be certain. If there is someone out there who truly deserves to become an A-list movie star right now it is Jodie Comer. 

I recently performed the mental exercise of running through all the British film and television actresses I know of in her age group to see if it might be possible to make another adaptation of The Sun Also Rises, the casting of Lady Brett Ashley being the principal hurdle such a production would have to overcome prior to shooting. Comer was the closest I could get to a possible fit. 

Dog Botherer

It is our (small) misfortune to have two townships to the south of us named after this supernatural nuisance — St Michael the Archangel, a personage apparently responsible for a good deal of dog-bothering rumpus today, seen here rudely interrupting a young lady during her me time. 

She's like, whoooa dude, I'm reading...

(Above: The Annunciation by Hans Memling c1465-70. One of the largest surviving depictions of this unsolicited interruption, it was painted by a journeyman artist working at the time in Rogier's Brussels workshop who later established himself properly in Bruges.)

MUNAG

Say St Michael to me, and I start to think of not ordinary food...

Old (2021)

You wait many years for a film with a lead character called Guy and then two come along in the same month! 

That the one here is being played by Gael García Bernal is one of the many things that feel a bit askew about this latest dose of hokum from M. Night Shyamalan. 

The premise is somehow promising yet it isn't his; he picked it up from a graphical novel called Sandcastle by Pierre Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters — a secluded beach where visitors age years by the hour. 

From that starting point everything is kind of mangled. The casting, the dialogue, the acting, the direction. There surely needs to be some gathering tension and existential dread in the first hour or so, and to some extent there is, but it is served up disjointedly. 

Even the way the ageing is handled is unconvincing. For sure it is easier to fast-grow children by swapping actors, but the director doesn't really seem interested in the human ageing process — physical and psychological — and key developments are almost never gradual, but oddly abrupt and uneven.

Perhaps all this sloppiness derives from the moment we are in, for Old has that look and feel of a movie concept that was green-lighted largely because of the pandemic conditions the industry was grappling with. *

In his BBC Five Live show Mark Kermode name checked The Beach and The Twilight Zone as two antecedents that came readily to his mind. To mine too, but only as examples of things I'd rather have been watching. 

Still, I was never more annoyed with this movie that when in the midst of all of its idiosyncratic twitches. Now that time has indeed passed, my impressions are perhaps a little smoother and a tad more favourable. 

* On TV this year the ensemble cast in isolated spot trope has been explored successfully by The White Lotus. Meanwhile, Nine Perfect Strangers flattered to deceive.

Uncontrolled Descent

One of the first ready-made philosophical debating tools that I had, to some extent, rammed down my throat at Cambridge was the notion of the slippery slope. The speaker was none other than Baroness Mary Warnock, Mistress of my college, she of Warnock Report(s) fame, landmark UK investigations into special needs in education and experiments on human embryos, and so her own take on the matter was along the lines of not all slopes are as slippery as they may at first appear. 

A good many of the arguments being deployed against covid vaccination programmes are conspicuously batty — however, a few do seem to be grounded in some sort of intuitive grasp of the slippery slope, rather like the mindset of a passenger on a bus descending Las Cañas. 

So while us rational folk might chuckle when someone who has already been vaccinated half a dozen times in their lifetime suddenly resists this new jab, and usually for apparently loopy or selfish reasons, we must not entirely blind ourselves to the ever so slightly inclined wet floor here. It's fun being right, but one is never perfectly right. 

A couple of news items during the past week spring to mind. The view out of Oxford University that the novel coronavirus is on its way to becoming just another endemic pathogen causing the common cold and the announcement by Pfizer that their trials of a tablet, both prophylactic and treatment against covid, are showing promising results. 

There's a potential miniature slippery slope right there, between vaccination and therapy. Between measures designed to protect society and those that could protect smaller associations within it.  

One's childhood vaccinations are to some extent one's own business. As an adult I have had several boosters plus the Yellow Fever shot, all elective. And when I had an employer, my health records were never a talking point. 

But this could be about to change. Employers may be set to become inured to mandating certain medications for their staff. How much are they losing to sick days, even just those related to the sniffles?

Vaccine mandates are nothing new in US history. George Washington was a pioneer, making sure every member of the Continental Army received the jab (more like a stab really) for smallpox. And he did this knowing that he was in effect decimating his soldiery, as one in ten would go on to develop the proper, gross version of the disease. He was prepared to take the risk, with the appropriate cover-up package in place. 

The collective imperative was further upheld by a Supreme Court decision in the late nineteenth century supporting the vaccination imposed by Cambridge (copycat version) and thus permitting similar measures by state and township authorities across the US, which has remained unchallenged ever since. 

American liberty was never a 'free for all'. My special subject at Cambridge (original version) was the drafting and ratification of the US Constitution. It may come as news to contemporary American 'conservatives', but the so-called Founding Fathers generally believed in order through representation, in liberty constrained by obligation. 

Their basic beef was with arbitrary government, not any sort of government that pretends to tell one what to do. They spent a lot of time haggling over that document because they desired a durable framework. Drooling libertarians were duly dispatched to the frontier, which now exists largely only in the minds of MAGA eedjits.  

The needs of the one were always measured against those of the many. Where we perhaps need to be wary now of the slippery slope is in circumstances where collective becomes a not-so-invisible cloak for corporate. 

Custeristic

 

An adjective that was apparently very much part of the discourse back in '69, and could perhaps do with a dust-off today, especially after those scenes of horseback charges at the Del Río camp in Texas. 

Le Backstab

Covid has seemingly converted Australia into the deep space colony it perhaps always yearned to be.

It may look large enough in an atlas or on the Summer Olympics medals table, but population-wise it’s one and a half Guatemalas, or two thirds of a Tokyo...a sort of sub-tropical, leafy suburban outpost that the anglo-saxonne tendency has has thought prudent (though of course this is moot) to provide with nuclear attack submarines.

I guess if they do get into a lamp-post pissing contest with China and the world goes to shit, we’ll still always have the way the French have reacted to le backstab.

Meanwhile, New Zealand has kind of erased itself entirely from the map. They were already legimimately missable down there before, but they are now going the full hog. Or mutton.

Nine Elevens

A day to reflect perhaps on the covert non-linearity of time. I doubt there is anyone who experienced 9-11 as an adult that has any real sense of temporal distance from that moment. Or rather collection of moments — each as vivid and significant as something that occurred only yesterday. 

My first one is lightly blurred. I recall I found the news of a plane crash at the WTC — assumed to be a small plane — on the BBC News website and was soon after taking a call from a colleague working from home and simultaneously watching live who was cut short in mid-sentence when footage of the second plane's impact was shown. I then got in a lift and descended to the bar on the ground floor in search of plasma screens. There I found the Chairman sitting — alone — watching the towers burn, leaning back into the sofa with his arms outstretched either side of him. 

Then, a frantic exchange of calls with my wife. The reaction of the woman sitting at the desk beside mine whose mother had called from a bus travelling along Broadway, having just witnessed the jumpers. 

The next recollection is one of mental confusion. The need to attend a meeting about something which would have seemed trivial at the best of times and not really being able to comprehend how anyone was able to go through with it. Only a distraught American colleague seemed to get it. 

During that meeting the towers came down. And then, a long-scheduled trip that same evening to the Globe Theatre to see some minor comedic nonsense by the Bard. It had been set up as a 'treat' for the PA department following an award. I left at the midway interval. I remember standing beside the Thames and observing with a chill as jet after jet passed in their descent over the City. 

This image can be found on page sixteen of an oddly dystopian picture book called 'Starters Places: America' that I was given in 1972, mixed up with illustrations of tornadoes, dirty oil, hulking, gas-guzzling cars, slavery, sporting violence and junk food. (On the plus side, it asserts that the Pilgrim Fathers 'made friends with the Indians'.)

Raducanu

Remembering how John McEnroe rather smugly informed his BBC co-presenters during Wimbledon this year how the USTA would be unlikely to offer Emma Raducanu a wildcard. 

You know what I was thinking — you cannot be seeeeerious! 

Writing on Coffee House before the US Open final today Damian Reilly suggests that "The very best, in tennis as in all sports, almost without exception, make it look beautiful – it’s why we can’t take our eyes off them (because beauty is an element-bending superpower)."

This is true to a point. This ability to make tennis look beautiful has often been missing in the 'very best' in recent times, most obviously in the form of the undoubtedly great Djokovic and Williams, no matter how many affirmations they seem to make on court and afterwards of supernatural support. 

Going back just a bit we find also wonderful players like Navratilova and Sampras, whose ascendancy was grounded in the ruthless application of a single devastating technique, which was then most effective on grass. 

Element-bending is not the same as power, endurance, relentlessness, mental toughness, shot variety, on court intelligence, serving aces at break point and so on, useful and amazing as these things all are. Or the gladiatorial qualities we admire in the likes of Connors and Nadal. 

When Federer was in his prime, even when not winning, there was indeed a numinous quality to his play. Those moments that could bring an 'Oh I say...' out of Dan Maskell — and I reluctantly have to admit that there were occasions when John McEnroe himself was deserving of the exclamation. Yet, as with Andy Murray, these were flourishes only, somewhat smothered by a sulky on-court demeanour.

During Raducanu's semi against Sakkari the other night, the US commentators started to talk in hushed whispers, unconsciously responding to the aesthetic element of the 18-year-old's play. It's way too early to 'anoint', as another commentator said during the previous match, but the force does appear to be strong in this one...

Fernández too. On paper this was always going to be an exceptional conclusion to the women's event and it played out in brilliant fashion, potentially eclipsing Djokovic's scheduled coronation as the statistician's GOAT tomorrow. 

This interview with Leylah's Ecuadorian father Jorge was very touching. 

At a time when global citizenship might seem to be both outmoded and hazardous, these two young women could be significant role-models. 

Nine Perfect Strangers — first impressions

We binged on Nine Perfect Strangers until we became held up at the end of episode five, perhaps the least satisfying, most daytime-soapy so far.  

It otherwise seems to be Fantasy Island meets Lost on shrooms. Not as good as and certainly more wayward tonally than The White Lotus, but kind of fun. 

It may not help that Dead Calm aside, I have always been a bit Kidman-sceptical. Here she does Russian only marginally better than Comrade Winstonovsky in Black Widow. 

Parry, riposte

I hate to do the whole "I told you so" routine, but in this case it was always blindingly obvious that Dr G would be disinclined to simply stroll away once his curfew was stymied. 

He will come back with alternative ways to restrict activities, and for some, these will appear more, not less, onerous. With another 80 deaths recorded yesterday, he will be left with little choice. 

Other than Allan Rodríguez the thing that annoys me most about this little fiasco is the damage done, in the short-term at least, to the inflow of tourists. 

Arrivals from abroad already have to complete an online health form that, when it works, serves them up with a QR code. Was it completely beyond the authorities to allow this to double up as a transit pass during the toque de queda?  

In 2010 I visited Bangkok during a curfew imposed at a time of significant political instability. I spent the first night at the airport. I am not sure if I could have found a way to leave, but the restaurants in there are (extremely) good, so I didn't really care. 

The next day I found that the Thais had established a sort of tiny tourist pocket around Khao San Road, where bedtimes were effectively unrestricted. Travel into the downtown area was impossible at night and unadvisable by day, but I managed to treat myself to the thrill of turning up as a lone farang at some of the major temples. 

Antigua is pleasant when it is quiet, but deserted bars and restaurants are hardly a big lure and a nighttime curfew is always a total buzzkill. 

Already limited to tourists almost exclusively from this hemisphere Guatemala's leading industry could (really) do without enforced lockdowns after dark and other blanket restrictions on inter-departmental movement. If Belize can conceive of and manage a system of safe corridors and other  amnesties for foreign visitors, it surely cannot be beyond Guatemala. 

Llamadas Locales Pero A Gran Costo

33 years since I first came to Guatemala, and there are still things that anger and disgust me...

Schrödinger's Toque de Queda

After viewing the fifth film in the franchise I was left to ponder...where can they possibly take this next?'

And then Guatemala came to the rescue with 'Is there a fecking Purge?'

Seems not, but the original 9pm Ley Seca remains, plus all the Cemáforo Epidemiológico stuff that nobody seems to be paying much attention to. 

Meanwhile, since I was last in the USA...

That is what avoidable looks like.

See also the short-term impact on tourism revenues here in Guatemala just from the announcement of our abortive curfew and the wider determination to pursue a set of extremely clunky, un-sophisticated control measures.

Cur...phew?

At least someone has woken up this morning with a sense of clarity on this matter...

There does seem to be a suggestion that the Guatemalan Congress needs to come back and formally vote to disapprove of the State of Calamity, which is likely to go as well as their attempts to approve it. 

Anyway, I cannot see how a blanket curfew was going to be of much use in the current situation. 

And we kind of resented the restrictions on our freedom of movement when very clearly many organisations around town, largely in the spirituality and hospitality trades, seemed unwilling to even toe the line when it comes to the 'traffic light' system of controls, which have been in place since last year. 

The church in our village has been openly cheating with respect to 'virtuality' since the weekend. The Power And The Glory sprung to mind. 

We shall probably have to wait and see now what the executive can manage in terms of measures with real ameliorative impacts. Parts of the Estado de Calamidad involve edicts which could be imposed by local mayors anyway without constitutional consequences.

In yesterday's address Dr G said encouraging things about the vaccination programme. This on a day it was revealed that approximately 4/5 of the newly-infected hail from the un-vaccinated parts of the population. 

This is all too easily mapped on to the stat that 4/5 of Guatemalans remain un-vaccinated. 

The President spoke as if real progress is being made, of the kind that will soon make it possible to ignore those new infection figures. Yet, after 18 months of this, people surely do not need to be reminded that they can pick up the coronavirus handling tomatoes in the market and pass it on to others regardless of their own infection or vaccination status. 

This risk will only diminish when the virus starts to run out of vectors and Guatemala is a long, long way still from that scenario. 

The mostest truth...

A rather hilarious post today from an old acquaintance of this parish. 

One should worry less that he thinks that this is a 'metaphor' than about the fact that he seems to believe that the horse paste could be of some use against covid. *

“Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space," said Orson Scott Card — but when you don't actually know what they are, they can lose their way in this respect. 

It is a well known phenomenon that those of a religious bent have a greater tendency to mistake metaphor for fact. 

Should we mention that he should actually thank the Jews for that day off every week? 

He strikes me as the sort who might tend to confuse them with communists, when not referring to them as capitalists...but not the good sort, like the convicted fraudster 'Mark Francis' himself. 

There's quite a bit of mortal sin going on (or about to go on) in that illustration. 

Meanwhile...

* The US National Poison Data System reports a 245% increase in overdoses of ivermectin, which some people believe can treat Covid-19 despite a lack of data, between July and August.

 

#JusticiaParaVerónica — #YositengoPrecedente

There's a line, one that every decent man is surely aware of, that leads from ill-bred rudeness, through psychological abuse, physical harm and on to rape. 

Yet referring to it as a line can be deceptive. Along its course there are some significant discontinuities — points where irrevocable, qualitative changes occur, leaps forward across sometimes vast, yet often barely visible rifts in the route. 

The pilots that take airliners at gathering velocity down the runway on their way on down and then up, have names for a couple of these: V1, V2. Women also have a word for the gap between rough sex and rape: NO. 

Perhaps the most insidious ploy available to a defence lawyer in criminal cases relating to gender violence, particularly when the defensora is herself female, is to downplay the significance of these discontinuities. 

In Verónica Molina Lee's case there was a parallel line she had to traverse, from thoughts of self-imposed amnesia and reconciliation to putting herself through the travails of forensic and media examination. There is a huge and daunting chasm there for any woman to contemplate. 

Followers of the twittering classes here in La Antigua will already know what has transpired. Diego Ariel Stella has a possibly temporary new home with bars in Chimaltenango. His accuser will now have her rightful opportunity to present her evidence in court. 

My sincere wish is that this establishes a precedent, and that my own Verónica will now also be permitted the same opportunity, despite those preemptive moves to downgrade the charges faced by her male aggressor — beyond the influence and purview of his victim — which this high-profile case has shone a light on. 

Meanwhile, if the parrillero is a profoundly misunderstood man, then I wish him good fortune. He will need it. He may struggle to get a fair trial now for he has conspired against himself to an astonishing degree, not least by picking a guilt-by-association defence lawyer and ending up in a situation where it has become unclear whether she is the bigger liability to him or vice versa. 

He didn't pick his sister, but she plainly isn't supporting the appearance of polished respectability either. 

Guilt by association — how it works.

Yo si...no mucho te creo. 

Using autocue, but without Oprah, he has belatedly essayed the 'my truth' testimony and then in the sala this morning finally appeared to show some remorse. 

Too little, too late. The cabashero, frente en alto routine would have been more appropriate at the start of the process, not the middle, and he rather obviously originally went for the box of tricks instead before the Jugado de Primera Instancia Penal. 

The boycott gathering around the restaurants he has fronted in a naff gaucho hat — NiFu Ni-Fa* — is an unfortunate sideshow. Claudia Paniagua's other toxic male client  — Jason Wade Lever — is also part-proprietor of hospitality businesses in town, yet I have never mentioned them by name, as I am aware that they have other, more involved socios and employees who have had no part in the relevant transgressions. 

Lever and his lawyer appear to have no shared language, so one would have to ask why he would be prepared to tolerate this sort of inconvenience? What else has the "defensora de los..." been bringing to the party? 

Today she appears to have recluded herself from the Diego Ariel Stella case. This really should mark the formal conclusion to her scumbag-defending days. 

On one of several occasions that she has forced a delay in the juicio featuring Lever — one of Antigua's most prepotente masculine scumbags — she presented a sick note. 

Yet an old school friend, himself a judge, came up to V and informed her that he had only just been in a courtroom that same morning with the Magistrada Suplente, in which she had been representing a drug dealer. 

"Tiene Nombre"

Today the Magistrada Suplente did not appear in court beside her client but instead seems to have sent a surrogate who duly attempted to precipitate a re-programming of the audiencia — precisely the same artimaña attempted last month on behalf of Jason Wade Lever. On both occasions the judges were wise to this ruse and did not permit it. 

Guatemalans are rightly up in arms just now about corruption, but the traffic of influence is on many levels something more pernicious. There are functionaries here who would never take a brown envelope under the table who nevertheless permit themselves lapses in rectitude owing to pressure from the likes of Consuelo Porras and Claudia Paniagua. Enough! 

* I generally won't hold it against a bar or an eatery that its owner is a bit of a turd, just like I won't (yet) deprive myself of movies with Johnny Depp in them. However, in this particular instance, we went once and never again, because the waiters had that most bothersome tendency to take up position just at the edge of one's peripheral vision and from said station, spent the entire meal making exasperatingly unsolicited interventions. 

An invigorated optimism...

"As I emerge off the Penn Station elevator into a lightening gray dawn, the giant Corinthian colonnades of the post office building create the illusion of a grand boulevard, and an invigorated optimism floods me, like it's the first morning of a long-awaited trip to Paris" > Frankie Goldberg/Francisco Goldman, Monkey Boy